When I started writing about corporate America a little over 20 years ago, the fundamental PR problem capitalism faced was that it had gutted so many retirement funds. Tens of millions of Americans had lost their nest eggs piling into the stocks of companies that had cooked their books, and the populist outrage was so intense and bipartisan that the Sarbanes-Oxley accounting reform bill, which made it a felony for CEOs and CFOs to sign off on SEC filings they knew to be fraudulent, passed both houses with just three “nay” votes in both houses. Still, fully half of Americans that year said they were “very” or “somewhat satisfied” with the size and influence of large corporations.
Eight years later, after corporate America had made trillions throwing millions of American families out of their homes under fraudulent pretenses, that number plunged to 29 percent, and today as Sarbanes-Oxley has been used primarily to pad the sentences of January 6th participants and prosecutions of white-collar criminals are at an all-time low, just 24 percent report being satisfied with the size and influence of corporations; another quarter of Americans—and 41 percent of younger ones, along with an apparent 47 percent of Princeton students—have told pollsters they are “satisfied” with the assassination of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare.
That’s because corporate America, and the political class that professionally enables it, is increasingly synonymous with needless death. Pretty much every story I have written this year seems to have revolved around this unfortunate fact.
1. The year started with a terrifying Alaska Airlines accident that didn’t kill anybody but reminded us of the hundreds of innocents killed in recent years by the deranged corporate sadism—and apparent absolute impunity—of the Boeing Company, whose ranks include not just the 346 killed aboard the egregious 737 MAX but many heretofore anonymous members of the company’s own engineering and machinist staffs. Not long after the “quality escapement,” a former Boeing quality manager named John Barnett, terminated in 2017 for being too knowledgeable, joined the ranks of Boeing dead the morning he was supposed to give his last day of testimony in his protracted seven-year legal battle against his old employer, and I wrote about the torment he endured at Boeing’s anti-union plant in cool food mecca Charleston, South Carolina.
2. In May, the hospital Ponzi scheme Steward Health became perhaps the most prolific corporate murderer yet to win near-total absolution for its crimes in the Southern District of Texas, whose corrupt “complex case panel” at the Houston federal courthouse I demystified in a long feature earlier this year that explored how the court had become a haven for companies hoping to abuse the bankruptcy code to discharge malpractice, wrongful death, and other such judgments for killing, harming, and maiming innocents using a trick colloquially known as the “Texas Two-Step.”
3. It later emerged that Steward hospital plunderer Ralph de la Torre—who spent the summer at Versailles as the loved ones of patients who had been killed or permanently maimed in his wretched hospitals learned that he’d personally looted the coffers of the hospital chain’s fake malpractice insurer such that there was no money to pay the settlements they’d been promised—had also schemed to spend the hospital’s funds murdering one of his critics, after a long Steward-financed campaign to smear him as an “agent of Vladimir Putin” did not succeed at silencing him. De la Torre is supposedly under criminal investigation, but how was he not in prison five years ago?
4. Over the summer, Steward’s assets were sold off for bargain-basement prices to just the sort of upstanding operations you might imagine: a group of guys who founded the algorithm UnitedHealth is accused of using as a pretext to euthanize Medicare Advantage patients, and a Flint-based company accused by doctors, nurses, and auto insurers of recruiting and promoting physicians who perform unnecessary surgeries, among many others.
5. And then an alumnus of my alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, killed the UnitedHealth CEO—but not before a powerful clique of Penn alum billionaires launched the “antisemitism crisis” last fall, essentially simultaneously, that laid the financial groundwork for not just the seemingly endless genocide of the Palestinian people but the violent suspension of the First Amendment rights of anyone expressing solidarity with them, as well as the seemingly unstoppable comeback of fellow Penn alum Donald Trump. I wrote about a whistleblower case against UnitedHealth that lays bare the folly of trying to use “market incentives” to rein in the frauds of men who are greedy enough to kill innocent people for money, and how Kamala’s devastating loss demonstrates the folly of taking money from such odious people.
